View American Dirt Track Racer
“The American Dirt Track Racer”
By Joe Scalzo
Review by Gregg Leary
Category:Auto Racing
Joe Scalzo is one of my favorite authors. Dirt track racing is one of my passions. The combination of the two is “The American Dirt Track Racer,” a lively read that I spent a below zero Ohio weekend rereading for this review.
Scalzo’s lively style is illustrated on the back dustcover jacket:
“For 20 glorious years, from 1951-1971, dirt track racing lured some of the best racers and biggest characters to unpaved tracks scattered across the country. Rodger Ward, A.J. Foyt, Mario Andretti, Tony Bettenhausen, and Parnelli Jones are just some of the great drivers who accepted the dirt track challenge, piloting Kuzmas, Meskowskis, Watsons, and Kurtis-Krafts faster than conditions or physics would seem to allow.”
“This was racing at its raw and raucous best. Each race was a chance to make a career, or end one-a mad scramble that tested every ounce of man and machine, putting the best and luckiest in the winner’s circle and those whose luck had run out in the ‘marble orchard.’”
The front cover photo of Al Unser at Sacramento in 1970 beautifully captures the end of the era covered in the book. Unser won the race and the USAC championship that year-the last year that dirt tracks were included in the IndyCar championship hunt.
“The American Dirt Track Racer” contains five chapters and scores of black and white and color images in its 180 pages.
Chapter 1: 1951-1971: The Panzer and the Flower Child
Chapter 2: Stay Out of the Marble Orchard
Chapter 3: Sleds, Chugs, and Boxes
Chapter 4: The Eleventh Commandment and “Oops!”
Chapter 5: At the ‘Horne
“The Panzer” was Tony Bettenhausen. His motto was, “My head says no, but my foot says GO!” Scalzo’s caption beside a photo of Tony states, “Tony Bettenhausen was said to bring an extra 100 horsepower to everything he touched; he exercised his chariots to the limit whether they like it or not.”
Some of my favorite lines from “The American Dirt Track Racer:”
“Dirt track racing, (is) a uniquely American invention, like jazz-and, just like jazz, complete with wild tempo changes and mad improvisations and madder characters. And who could tell? Perhaps the most far-out solo was going to be authored by the ensemble’s most innocuous-looking member.”
“Miles are old-fashioned punishment palaces…not with mundane bumps but horrible craters.”
“Outside of winning Langhorne, which carried a whole different sort of prestige, the Hoosier Hundred-with prize money second only to the Indy 500’s, and with most of the big teams headquartered right in Indianapolis-was the circuit’s crucial 100-miler.”
“Ascot on a foggy cold sprint car Saturday night with all stadium lights ablaze and the injected Chevys pounding your skull in tempo with the cackling and boiling Offys: fantasyland, a kind of paradise on earth.”
“The fan dance of nighttime dirt track racing! What is there about nighttime combat that makes everything rev up so much harder than by dull day? Danger and adrenaline and endorphins are foxtrotting everywhere.”
“Rim-riding-moving out of the regular racing groove seeking greater momentum patrolling in the jagged dirt piled up on the track rim…revved up your pulse, bulged your eyes, and afterward left you with an indelible memory to take home after the race.” (For the drivers AND the fans.)
“Iron roll cages may well be the visual ruin of sprint, midget, and dirt champ cars, but at long last a driver’s first line of defense isn’t his own skull, neck, and shoulders when his open-cockpit tumbles.”
“…the coup de grace of race car uglification-over-the-cockpit “wings” as ungainly as garage doors.”
“Midgets are mere toys compared to champ dirt cars of almost twice the tonnage and 3 ½ times the ordnance.”
“There were not one but two possible final destinations for the dirt track warrior. One was the Indy 500, where everyone wanted to go; the second was where nobody wanted to go…the ‘marble orchard.’”
Parnelli Jones called A.J. Foyt “the best of them all.”
Scalzo writes:
“Foyt became 1951-1971’s irreplaceable name by going fast in anything and winning everywhere. He just didn’t feel as if he was living up to his talents unless he was winning on the bricks of Indy one Sunday and the hummocks of Langhorne the next. And then strapping himself to a midget at Terre Haute. And then dizzily climbing up the slants of Salem in a sprinter. And then attacking at hurtling speed through the Pacific Coast fog at Ascot. Still the great one wasn’t done. Occasionally A.J. had to go race in the taxicab Deep South. When the occasion demanded, he’d even go and win some international sports car match.”
“I ran out of brakes-‘n’ brains.” Roger McCluskey (after crashing at IRP)
“There are no bad race tracks, only bad race drivers.” Bobby Grim
“If it works, plagiarize it,” became the universal rule of race car construction.
“Whenever an ex-race driver, car owner, or even hanger-on grew old, fat, and crippled with senile dementia he was reindoctrinated into a dirt track steward or referee.”
“Puke Hollow” at Langhorne “wasn’t so named because scared drivers tossed their cookies there. It was because all the extra speed made engines regurgitate rods, pistons and whatnot.”
“Why at Langhorne’s finale did fans take home brown bags filled with souvenir scoops of contaminated black earth as last mementos? For the same reason that road racers deplore the passing of such wonders/horrors as the Mexican Road Race, the Mille Miglia, and the original Nurburgring and Spa-Francorchamps. The ‘Horne was just about the last of the really difficult, ennobling race tracks, and watching the spectable of a ‘Horne 100-miler was like nothing else.”
The jacket states, “’The American Dirt Track Racer’ revives the spirit and the thrill of dirt track racing’s greatest era.” I couldn’t agree more. It earns 4 out of 5 lug nuts. Turn right to go left. Order it today at SPEEDtv.com.